MyTime Aims To Be The Amazon Of Local Services, By Replacing Receptionists

Not long after Amazon started selling books in 1995, people thought the world's mom-and-pop shops would all end up online, yet today only a single-digit percentage of
local business in the United States conduct any kid of e-commerce beyond posting their contact details on
Google and
Yelp. Want to make a hair or chiropractor's appointment? You often still have to book with a receptionist or whoever answers the phone. An upstart app called MyTime wants to disrupt that by fusing the calendars of salons, restaurants and yoga teachers with its own booking system, so that you can make appointments with all of them through its mobile app - just as you can buy a product directly on Amazon.

A screen shot from booking app MyTime.

MyTime has been on the web since February, through the site MyTime.com, but is launching an iOS app today that lets people book a service with more than 2 million businesses across the U.S. Nearly all of the business profiles on the app have been automatically generated, but 3,000 of them have agreed to sync their calendars with MyTime in exchange for sharing a slice of revenue.

Founder Ethan Anderson expects that number to rise 10 fold over the coming months, assuming more people book through MyTime. The tech community here seems to have high hopes: earlier this week his app won a unanimous vote from 10 judges at the LAUNCH Mobile & Wearables conference in San Francisco, after competing with four other startups.

Anderson's growth strategy is pretty clever. He has three overseas workers (in India) who will take any bookings made on the app and physically call the salon or restaurant on the user's behalf, then email the user back to say if their appointment has been successful. This can be a little time consuming - I tried booking a hair appointment on the MyTime website and had to go back and forth to find a good time.

The overseas worker essentially plays two roles: a one-time personal assistant for me, and a sales person for MyTime. Once they have the salon on the phone to book an appointment, they mention that it came through MyTime, before adding, "Would you like us to create a free profile for our app, so we can connect to you calendar?"

When MyTime trialled this for six months through its desktop site in Los Angeles, more than 70% of businesses said "yes." Some 40% of them were using Google Calendar to keep track of their appointments, and Anderson used Google's API to sync their calendars through a widget on the MyTime website.

For the businesses using
Microsoft Outlook, Anderson's overseas workers would get them to download a executable file that installed itself as a plugin to Outlook, and communicate with the MyTime server every 10 minutes. MyTime integrates with more than 18 other calendar programs, including Apple's iCal, Mind Body and Dentrix, a calendar for dentists.

"We built an entire software engineering team around integrating the third-party calendaring programs," says Anderson. It took a team of seven people a year and a half to build the integrated calendar, which is constantly being updated so support new types of bookings, such as joining a yoga class of 30 other people which can be more complex.

It begs the question of why Google hasn't built a system that connects other calendaring programs too. Anderson doesn't say, but he is adamant that no one else has built something like this -- a single, Amazon-like destination for services. MyTime is also similar to the restaurant reservation service OpenTable, except that company charges subscription fees to restaurants and requires them to install a device called the Electronic Reservation Book, which can cost between $200 and $700.

The staff at MyTime, based in San Francisco

MyTime's system is entirely software based, and it makes money by taking 3% off of each transaction made through its app or site. If businesses want to be promoted on the site (86% have wanted to so far) they'll let MyTime take a 40% cut from the first transaction of each customer and 3% thereafter.

Anderson has put some of his own money into this venture after selling Red Beacon, an app that auctions home services tasks, to Home Depot last year. He's now raised $2.5 million in seed funding for MyTime from Mark Suster of UpFront Ventures in Los Angeles and $500,000 from angel investors -- and he's fully aware of the handful of other iOS apps with the same name, "MyTime."

"We have the trademark," Anderson says. "We can probably talk with Apple about that situation. That was unfortunate."

Ethan Anderson, founder and CEO of MyTime, is building all-in-one booking service for local businesses.

Does he also see a tragic irony in pitching receptionists with an automated service that could essentially take their jobs?

"A lot of these businesses don't have a receptionist," he counters. "It's actually the owner of the business - or one of the employees, as opposed to a dedicated receptionist. As a result they don't answer their phone. Trust me because we call them all the time."